An Asteroid Bigger Than the World’s Tallest Building Will Fly by Earth Next Month

A massive “potentially hazardous” asteroid spanning more than the length of the world’s tallest building will fly by our planet on Feb. 4.

The roughly .7-mile long asteroid is considered longer than the Burj Khalifa, which at .5 miles high currently stands as the world’s tallest building, and will fly at a speed of 67,000 miles per hour just 2.6 million miles from Earth.

“This is a fairly routine close approach of an object that we have known about for many years,” said Paul Chodas who manages the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Asteroid 2002 AJ192 was discovered in 2002.

“We’ve been tracking it since then so we know its trajectory very accurately and predicted this close approach years ago,” Chodas added. “Close approaches of near-earth objects happen almost daily, and many of them are closer than this.”